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Faux leather against drugs

30.09.2018

Researchers from the University of Chicago offer a peculiar way to deal with drug addiction - with the help of patches of genetically modified skin.

As you know, not so long ago, biotechnologists have a very effective tool for making the necessary amendments to the genome - a tool called CRISPR (which we have repeatedly written about). Using CRISPR, it is possible to insert genes that code for certain proteins into the DNA of skin cells, and then, after waiting for the skin cells to form the desired piece of skin, transplant them onto the body.

Previously, Xiaoyang Wu and his colleagues had already done similar experiments, forcing skin cells to synthesize insulin, so that the transplanted patch helped maintain normal blood sugar levels in diabetic mice. Now, instead of insulin, they decided to introduce the gene for butyrylcholinesterase, an enzyme that destroys cocaine, into skin cells. We have this enzyme anyway, it works with different substances, and the cocaine molecule is just similar to the molecules that butyrylcholinesterase deals with. However, the enzyme that we have is not very active, at least in relation to cocaine. But there is an improved laboratory version of it, which breaks down the drug 4400 times more efficiently.

Butyrylcholinesterase is much larger than insulin, and there were doubts that skin cells, which normally do not synthesize it (the enzyme is normally formed in the liver), will be able to handle it. However, the transplanted anti-cocaine skin worked as it should: two weeks after the transplant, the mice calmly tolerated the dose of the drug that had literally killed them before.

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